Nextek Limited, the UK consultancy with a focus on sustainable solutions in polymers and recycling that is founded and led by Professor Edward Kosior, has been named the winner of the Alliance Prize in Circular Solutions for Flexibles. This prize focusses on identifying and accelerating novel solutions that enable more effective collection, processing, and recycling of flexible plastics. The prize was presented at an event at the New York Stock Exchange on 29 Nov.
Nextek was recognised for its COtooCLEAN project, a multi-participant effort that aimed to find a solution to fill the gap in the recycling stream where food-safe post-consumer polyolefin films are currently missing. It beat out 4 other finalists, including Mura Technology’s scalable chemical recycling process; Blue Plastics BV, who developed a solvent-based washing technology to enable the circular use of flexibles; the CreaSolv process for PS recycling from GAW Technologies GmbH; and Impact Recycling Ltd’s water-based, density separation technology that separates problematic multi-layer flexible films from mono-layer.
The Nextek team came up with a process based on supercritical CO2 to decontaminate plastic films back to food-grade quality. The process allows circularity for food-grade films to be achieved by cleaning, decontaminating and then converting post-consumer film waste into recyclate suitable for use in new films with recycled content for food contact applications. The cleaning process is based on Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (ScCO2), a non-toxic, non-flammable and non-corrosive solvent that can selectively remove contaminants through use of co-solvents. In a single step, the process allows for the simultaneous removal of oils, inks, adhesives, labels and chemical contamination from post-consumer polyolefin films, using an environment-friendly process that can easily recycle the non-toxic solvent and separate the residues.
The process offers an 'impactful solution for the high levels of flexible film waste growing around the world’, said Steve Sikra, AEPW VP Americas, Alliance to End Plastic Waste.
"The relatively simple modification to the existing mechanical recycling process makes the potential impact of COtooCLEAN even greater because of its scalability to global adoption over time.”